Personal musings on Israel, Jewish matters, history and how they all affect each other

Monday, May 10, 2010

Israel Joins the OECD

The 31 members of the OECD today voted today to accept Estonia, Israel and Slovenia, which will thus become country members 32, 33 and 34. (The list of the other 31 is here).

The Economist often characterizes the OECD as "a rich-country think tank". While I doubt Israel's accession will make any difference in anyone's immediate day-to-day life, it's a nice club to belong to, and being inside is nicer than being outside.

The Palestinians did their best to prevent Israel being accepted, on the principle that anything that's good for Israel must be very bad. It seems however that the decision reflected actions and their expression in numbers, not ideology, so the Palestinian efforts didn't make any difference. The OECD press release announcing the decision (linked above) notes that "Israel’s scientific and technological policies have produced outstanding outcomes on a world scale."

4 comments:

The Guardian can now take credit for a second miss in another of its ever popular “rush to judgment” articles as it leads its readers on its version of an LSD trip down the I/P conflict (the other recent “rush to judgment” being the Dreyfuss debacle):

Put conditions on Israel’s OECD entryIsraeli accession to this group of nations must be contingent on a commitment to embark on a credible peace process”

Poor old Avi Shlaim … how I wish that thread were still open.

Today’s news:

Israel gets accepted into OECD after unanimous vote

—

I guess either:

a) No one wanted to put conditions on Israel’s entry into the OECD

or

b) Some people think there is a “credible peace process”‘

or

c) Some people don’t read the Guardian

or

d) Some people who do read the Guardian think Avi Shlaim has lost his marbles and don't care what the Guardian thinks

or

e) Some people just don’t give a damn about he whole I/P thing and think (shocking) that Israel and Turkey are the only economically developed countries in the ME.

Mind you, as someone pointed out on the Israeli news last night, Greece is also in the OECD …

you joined the Patent Cooperation Treaty in 1996 i.e. 14 years ago, so it was about time - Saudi Arabia which had the peculiar habit of fixing the date of invention as the date when the clerk got around to put the "received" stamp on the application still hasn't joined. (not that Saudi-Arabia was the most exotic state I had to deal with, that crown belongs to the US)Silke